from “Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room”
Jonathan Foiles | Reading Arendt in the Waiting Room | Belt Publishing | December 2024 | 160 Pages
My end goal here is not an altar call, but this journey across my autobiography, intertwined with a brief intellectual history and my own experiences as a therapist, has a similar goal in terms of application. Chances are you picked up this book in the quest for something to quell those 3:00 a.m. fears of impending doom, to enable you to move through a chaotic, unpredictable world with something approximating hope. My purpose in writing this is not just to get more people to read philosophy and consider the wider factors that can influence our mental health—even if they often go undiagnosed and underexplored. I also want to help you find a new way of thinking. We cannot just stop there, however; if we are to avoid some of the worst predictions for what our future might hold, we must act. We must work to put something into being rather than only talking about it. I hope you hear the call to action echoing through the following pages.
•
My children remember the winter of 2022 and 2023 as the one without snow. Both of them were born in the summer, but they love the winter—the snowmen and sledding and hot chocolate of it all. Every time it snowed that season, I watched as they attempted to build a snowman from the scant inch or so we had received, making a figure that ended up being more mud than snow. Their sled sat unused in our basement storage. Their new snow pants remained in the closet. At first the lack of snow felt like a reprieve—no treacherous sidewalks, no tedious mornings cleaning the car windshield. But then it began to feel a little uncanny, and as the end of winter drew near without any real snowfall, it just felt sad.
I’ve been aware of climate change for most of my life, and I’ve seen and read various ways of conceptualizing the impact it will have upon the planet. I must admit I’ve spent quite a bit of time avoiding the issue, not out of disbelief but rather a willed ignorance. When I look at my children, though, I can’t allow myself that luxury. I know their lives, and the rest of mine too, will be shaped in ways I cannot imagine by our ever-warming earth. They know little about the science of it now, but they can tell when something is wrong, when a winter comes and goes without snow.
My father’s family is from northern Wisconsin, and each summer, we make a trip to see them and celebrate my grandmother’s birthday. My grandfather was a dairy farmer, and though no one in the family farms anymore, several members still live on the acreage he worked when he was alive. On our most recent visit, my daughter was able to see and hold a small toad that was hopping amid the lawn chairs, and it electrified her. For the rest of our time there, she told us she wanted to move and live in Wisconsin when she grew up, that she thought the city was fine but that she would rather live amongst nature, that all animals were her friends. She also mentioned that maybe she didn’t want to eat them anymore. I celebrated seeing her come alive, so vivid and so clear in her passion, but also felt a twinge of regret. What sort of nature, what sort of world, will be there for her once she grows up?
•
When it came time for me to choose a college, the clear choice seemed to be the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Once I arrived, though, it no longer seemed so obvious. Despite being within an hour’s drive of my home and located in a city I loved, I struggled with the transition. A therapist once asked me why I didn’t dream bigger than my backyard, and while I didn’t know the answer at the time, I’ve come to realize that the University of Illinois was about as big as the frame I was raised with could accommodate. Out of a high school graduating class of forty-two, only two other students besides me went to four-year universities; the rest pursued community college, entered a trade, or started working. The University of Illinois, even if the distance wasn’t far geographically, was located in a different universe from that. My parents had also divorced during my senior year in high school, and while it felt inevitable when it happened, it still shook me, making me feel vulnerable to sudden change in a way I hadn’t before.
Once I moved on campus, I found myself drowning. In my first year, the undergraduate enrollment was over thirty-one thousand students; my entering class contained about fifteen times the number of people as my entire hometown. I struggled to connect, worried that I never would. I experienced more anxiety than I had at any point until then and probably since. I considered dropping out, transferring to a smaller, more manageable school. None of this resolved itself overnight, but gradually, I made friends—good friends who didn’t just merely tolerate or acknowledge my interests but shared them. By the end of my first year, I felt at home.
While my problems were resolved on an emotional level for the time being, left unanswered was the question of what I should study or aspire to as a career. I did not declare a major at first, thinking that perhaps some path would unveil itself to me, but I found that I was still the same person I’d always been. My English classes remained my favorite, so I declared that as my major, vaguely planning upon a future career as an academic or a writer. In my mind, that would allow me the opportunity to read as many books as possible and contribute in some way to a broader intellectual tradition. I found myself with extra time on my hands beyond the major and some prerequisites to fulfill, so later, I added a second major in philosophy.
I wouldn’t say I was disappointed by the foundational classes I took within the philosophy department, but they didn’t electrify me in the same way reading Kierkegaard did. Logic, ethics, the thought of Kant: all of it seemed important in the same way that having a healthy breakfast or following the schematics while building a piece of furniture from IKEA were. But none of it got to the big questions that occupied a not-insignificant part of my interior life. I continued to read outside of class—Kierkegaard as always but also those, like Camus and Sartre, who built upon his work in the existential tradition. Browsing the course listings for the fall semester one summer, I was excited to see there would be an entire class on Martin Heidegger, a thinker I knew was important but had never read.
I treasured those walks to class every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Walking alongside the main quad to the Gregory Building, the trees were aflame with all the colors of autumn. If I arrived early enough, I would encounter my professor at the back of the building, dispassionately holding a cigarette between his fingers. His entire personality seemed muted: clothes, tone of voice, facial expressions. In each class, we would pore over a few pages of Heidegger’s most significant work, Being and Time, a thick black hardcover that took up most of the space in my backpack. My professor would unspool the text’s marvelous compound words, full of hyphens, that I’m sure were more mellifluous in the original German. Even in their imperfect English equivalents, though, I found a new way to think about what it means to find yourself alive in the surrounding world and what to do with the sheer miracle of existence.
Being and Time, which was originally published in 1927, is dense and difficult; even with the aid of the class and subsequent rereadings, I’m not sure I entirely understand it. I feel okay with that; some texts aren’t meant to be comprehended so much as they’re meant to be experienced. Today, when I introduce my own students to some particularly dense psychoanalytic text, I assure them people have been debating for decades the precise meaning of what they are encountering for the first time—a century even, in the case of early Freud. I don’t expect them to unlock it in a brief response, and in the same vein, I won’t pretend to do justice to the whole of Heidegger’s magnum opus here. Rather, I want to highlight what first stood out to me all those years ago, what lingers with me still, and how it might help us with the apocalyptic anxiety we may feel in our own time.
•
When I first began working on this book, I didn’t think so much of myself would find its way into it. Noticing that a number of my patients had anxieties not easily addressed by the standard etiologies and diagnoses, I was led to reflect upon how philosophy had helped address some of the times I’ve felt stuck in my own life and thought there might be a book there. As I sat down to write, however, I realized I couldn’t offer some coolly worded guide to the fears of the impending apocalypse without writing about how often it has felt like my own world was coming to an end. I didn’t settle upon philosophy out of some dispassionate search for meaning; I turned to it because I felt like I was drowning and was desperately searching for a life preserver.